On October 5, 2011 the computer industry icon
Steve Jobs passed to the other side. This event captured the attention and press of the nation in a manner that extended beyond the normal reach of the computer industry. Jobs was treated as a industry trailblazer and given essentially a state funeral by the American press. This is all well and good and much of the praise was well earned. Jobs was an innovator in the computing field and deserved to be recognized for it. The real tragedy here is that exactly one week later, a towering figure in the computing world passed away and was ignored by John Q. Public. He deserved better.
On October 12, 2011
Dennis Ritchie passed away and a true genius left the land of the living. Ritchie had a far greater impact on the computing world that Jobs could ever have and this quiet man's accomplishments echo loudly through the annals of computing history. I am willing to bet that few, if any readers, have even heard of him, but he deserves the title of genius and is a true computer science legend.
Dennis Ritchie was the co-creator of
UNIX (with Ken Thompson) and the creator of the 'C' programming language. Ironically, both of these technologies form the basis for many of Apple's products and form the foundational elements of things such as
Mac OS X and
iOS. Words cannot do justice the the full impact of these two contributions to the computer science profession. The two contributions bear mention here.
The C Programming Language - The best way I know of the illustrate the impact of C on the computer science profession is to realize that C was invented in the late 60s and early 70s and remains the most popular programming language in the world. C has withstood the onslaught of countless languages in its 40-year history and remains the king of the hill. I can think of no better tribute to Ritchie than to point out that a language developed 40 years ago remains not only relevant, but dominant in the computer industry.
UNIX - UNIX is quite simply, the most important operating system the world has ever seen. Despite the countless instantiations of Microsoft Windows that are installed around the globe, rest assured that the heavy lifting is done by UNIX or variants like Linux. The Internet runs on UNIX and always has. The synergy between the two contributions by Ritchie are underscored by the fact that UNIX is written in C. Every time you surf the web, you are using UNIX or something from UNIX. The TCP/IP stack source code that every Windows computer uses to connect to the Internet was taken directly from UNIX.
The list of things written in C and UNIX cannot be adequately addressed here but a quote by Google's Rob Pike puts everything in perspective:
“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that
pretty much the entire Internet runs on — is written in C. Web servers
are written in C, and if they’re not, they’re written in Java or C++,
which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C.
And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost
guarantee were written in C.”
Linus Torvalds (inventor of the Linux operating system) invoked the spirit of Sir Isaac Newton when he declared that his accomplishments were accomplished by "standing on the shoulders of giants". Jobs did this as well and the shoulders that they all stood on belong to Dennis Ritchie. We all owe a debt to this man and the silence around his death shows that true innovators can live behind the scenes.
